Yesterday I returned from my beach trip with my boyfriend. We spent Friday, Saturday, and most of yesterday on the coast and it was amazing. Very quiet and private, since we stayed in his family’s beach house, and safe since we avoided any public places where social distancing would have been difficult. It was a relaxing, much needed weekend. My boyfriend also used his kayak for the first time, which actually made me want to try kayaking. I have a fear of falling out of boats and drowning, so I wasn’t sure how stable the kayak would be in the water of the lake we went to, but it seemed completely safe. I think he might bring his other kayak when we go back in a couple of weeks.

I finished one of the books I was reading (Grief is the Thing with Feathers) and started a new book (Pride and Prejudice). I highly recommend the former! It’s a stunning, short, speculative fiction novel about a widower and his two songs grieving the loss of their mother and a crow comes and stays with them. I will absolutely be reading this book again. It was too jammed full of beautiful images and emotions for me to really take the time with it that I wanted. I’m also really fascinated by grief and how we carry it in our bodies, our minds, in our limbs, in our chests, etc. Grief is something I’ve tried to better understand as an adult. I’ve seen a lot of grief, a lot of really hard grief, a lot of different kinds of grief, and all of them have a different impact than the others. Almost as much as the body, a lot of my writing centers around grief and loss.

It felt amazing to start reading Pride and Prejudice again, too. I can already tell, I’m going to whiz through this novel. I usually do, since it’s not as long as some of the other 19th century British novels I love, but this time around especially, I’m primed to really focus a lot of my mind on it. Jane Austen gave us six of the most amazing novels in the English language. There’s a reason they’re made into movies over and over and over, and why writers still use Austen’s characters as starting points for continuing stories. We love Austen’s work, her settings, her characters, and the sheer magnetism of her female leads. Elizabeth Bennet is one of the most incredible female protagonists of all time, rivaled (in my mind) only by Elinor Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, Josephine March from Little Women, and Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables. I would add Jane Eye to this group, but I’ve been somewhat disillusioned by that novel in recent years.

I didn’t get as much writing done as I had hoped, but the point of the trip was to relax and give myself a break after completing my first packet, so I’m not upset by this. Today I’ll be getting more homework done, focusing on revising the current draft of my essay and moving closer to completion. My next packet is due on September 11, so my goal is to have each section completed by Friday of next week so I can really hone in on revision. I’m still on track to complete this essay by my third packet, which is really exciting.

That’s my update for the day! Hope you’re all doing well.